Talk:Tactical Surface Fighter/@comment-12494172-20150615235857/@comment-4391208-20150618040535
I think at this point I only have more questions than answers, so I will only touch on one point; the nation's attributes. If this country is really that mountainous as to make Japan look like a hill park, there really wouldn't be any nullification of advantages VS an F-22. Everyone has reduced range and nobody would fire a 120mm randomly, which, in the first place, is a (usually) line-of-sight unguided weapon and thus would not have any sensor returns; if you can see the muzzle flash then you're within range, and no one is going to stand still after firing one. End of the day, unless you can set up an ambush along one of the many mountain paths, assuming you managed to fool the US's orbital satellites from finding your forces, the F-22 can still detect your unit's seismic signatures from moving, from around the mountain corner, while you can't see its thermal until it chooses to expose itself. Even if the thermal sensors on the unit are powerful enough to see an F-22, when combat Type-94s couldn't see the same F-22s while they were approaching them head-on, the mountains basically cut everyone down to visual range and the F-22s can just as easily see the unit's heat/radar silhouette as the unit can see the Raptors on thermal, once they meet face-to-face. If the unit has thermal powerful enough to bypass more than a mountain's worth of bedrock and material (which is physically impossible in the first place without humanity reaching a much higher tech level than in ML UL/A) then no wonder it's being shunned by its neighbors, since nothing like that exists in Muv-Luv and the nation is obviously not interested in sharing its tech for trials towards the war effort; the exact accusations leveled towards the USA for the development of the F-22A, except that the US also produces many more different products that the other frontline nations do use regularly for the war effort. You are confusing maneuverability and speed. High power/weight ratio for the main engine simply gives you high speed, in a TSF's case Jump Unit airframe/swivel design and/or strength and the inclusion of auxiliary thrusters is what decides maneuverability, the ability to change direction quickly. A unit at high speed will typically want to be able to quickly bleed that speed when required via some means (airbrakes, or in TSF's case, turning the Jump Units to face forward; direct thrust reversal, before aiming their engines in the required direction), or direct thrust to change its heading to gain an early start in turning their unit in another direction (extra or main vector-capable thrusters, eg. the MiG-35's Jump Units or the aux. thrusters on the Shiranui Second). Physical issues aside (power/weight stacking), you can have both on the same machine, but you cannot operate both at the same time. Having speed on a defensive unit operating in mountain areas also seem contradictory; Mount Everest is slightly less than 9km in direct vertical height and most TSFs, with rocket engines operating, can probably easily hit half that limit, clearing the max height of those "mini-Everests" with little trouble. High P/W ratio is only if you want to sustain that acceleration/speed, in which case, the distance from mountain foot to mountaintop is negligible enough to not warrant a massive P/W ratio on a light unit compared to horizontal travelling distance, and just makes the engine less maintainable than a normal TSF engine. And most importantly, assuming your units need cover to sight the BETA for support fire; do they really need to hit the top, or can they do their job from in-between elevated peaks, because not every gap in-between mountains ends in a valley? One last thing; Muv-Luv features an otherwise normal Earth as its settings base. Mount Fuji is only 3.376km tall in direct vertical height. If these "mini-Everests" (how 'mini'? Less than 6km but more than 4km? Or is the threshold lower?) dominated most of this nation as to provide an impediment to BETA advance severe enough to funnel them into prepared killzones, then it would pretty much be impossible to set up a modern civilization on it without outside help, let alone remain isolated for any appreciable amount of time after an entire nation has been set up on it. Drilling for crude offshore is one thing (disregarding known crude concentrations), hydroponics (and other assorted farm-tech) is one other thing, but the issue of usable space for civilians required for any nation (that isn't majority factory sets and farms since I assume this isn't N. Korea Mark II) is compounded by the fact that mountains are not hills that can be excavated at a whim for anything resembling a city. They can ally with a large nation for other supplies, but you also have to consider its antagonistic neighbors; politics means that while you can be friends with the far-off USA, the neighborhood countries can really screw up your day by, say, invoking their maritime rights if shipments have no choice but to pass through their area, and that's just one out of many in the cutthroat world of politics. This would make for an interesting point of writing, but I leave it up to you. I can't really say anything else without making this any longer than it already is. I try to make them questions rather than flat-out opinions, so that you can find answers for them. While I don't believe in tying up your hands and ideas when it comes to any kind of story writing (you are free to write whatever you want even after all this), since you put up all these concepts, I gave my personal thoughts on it; bottom line is that, in my opinion, it has to be internally consistent with whatever setting you choose to use for it. Honestly I found the previous Type-77E concept quite more believable in that it couldn't do everything that modern TSFs could do given its traits of overspecialization, but still managed to excel in one or two attributes to make it viable in combat without knocking an unexplained hole in actual TSF tech development and/or the social/geographical development of Earth in Muv-Luv.